best free anti virus

[JoeyB]

Its just a numbers game I think...a majority of people use MS products so thats what the naughty boys attack. I use Windows on a Mac so get best (or worst) of both worlds lol

 

[Rezillo]

[QUOTE 3365076, member: 9609"]Well that was an easy fix - I done as you suggested and have not seen a pop up avast ad since, thank you...[/QUOTE]
Pleased to be of service

 

[Lisa21]

microsoft security essentials.

Runs silently in the background; doesn't hog resources; gets the job done effortlessly.

You can install, set up scheduled scans and simply forget about it.

I've tried them all and had issues at some time. All except MSE.

+1 for this. Its never let me down.

 

[Rezillo]

I was a fan of MSE until a few months ago when Mrs R received an attachment by email which she had saved, as it looked to her to be a genuine expected email, but panicked when instead of the pdf she was expecting on opening it, the Windows Run dialog box appeared.

To cut a long story short, after multiple AV installs, registry and file checking, it turned out that she hadn't gone as far as running the program, so it then came down to why MSE hadn't picked it up. The name and file size matched the genuine article exactly, which was first identified two months beforehand - a cryptolocker variant. Manually scanning it in MSE gave nothing but several online scanners picked it up straight away.

Would MSE have picked it up on running it? Was it a corrupted version that was not a threat? I don't know. However, Avast simply deletes these attachments from affected emails and puts Virus in the header - so far, I haven't seen anything remotely suspicious get through.

 

[Blue Hills]

Any advance on this useeful thread (hope Shaun let's it keep running despite his IT site - we cyclechat users do want to be safe online).?

I had to uninstall AVAST after a disasterous update which I think was incompatible with a Windows Update. A right nightmare that was - it stopped working - and may even have been responsible for my laptop getting totally screwed and having to go away to be fixed.

So I went to AVG which I have used in the past.

I have only today realised that despite its comforting logo sitting in the taskbar it doesn't seem to have been working for some time. Well at least I couldn't get it to scan, couldn't even open the user interface and couldn't even uninstall it using its built in uninstaller or even the windows control panel uninstaller. I had t use a special AVG downloadable uninstaller which after loads of finger nail biting has, touch wood, actually got it off the machine.

I ran Malwarebytes free and it detected nothing, which kind of surprised me as I thought that the non functioning AVG might be due to a virus which had got past it.

Am I rght to be reassured by the malwarebytes free finding nothing?

So am now back to Windows Defender MSE but am aware (see above) that it might not be much cop.

I read recently about Panda (was it Panda?) identifying one of its own updates as a virus and right royally screwing up lots of machines so that they wouldn't even boot.

Anyone got any other suggestions (no - an I don't mean changing operating systems).

I am on Windows 8 by the way

 

[andyfraser]

I don't use anti-virus software for the very reason you gave about AVG. I don't want to assume I'm protected but I don't want to have to check that I'm protected either. I find using nothing (Defender is installed and switched on but I don't really on it) makes me more careful.

I have Firefox installed with the No Script plugin. If I'm unsure about a URL I check it in Firefox or on an old iPad. If there's any chance that a URL might lead to something malicious I just don't bother with it at all. It also helps that I only have Windows installed on one machine.

 

[ColinJ]

[QUOTE 3365076, member: 9609"]Well that was an easy fix - I done as you suggested and have not seen a pop up avast ad since, thank you...[/QUOTE]
And thanks from me too!